[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 125 (Wednesday, July 24, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5037-S5038]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                            Budget Agreement

  On another subject, for the past week there have been ongoing 
discussions between congressional leadership and the administration 
relating to an agreement on budget caps and raising the debt limit. 
Those discussions produced an agreement that was announced Monday 
night.
  While I understand reaching an agreement was important to ensure the 
full faith and credit of the United States, I am disappointed the final 
agreement does not address a subject that has been causing heartache 
for millions of taxpayers for at least the past 6 months. The subject 
is what is known around Capitol Hill and Washington, DC, as tax 
extenders, things that come up every 2 or 3 years that need to be 
reauthorized.
  For decades, Congress has routinely acted on a bipartisan basis to 
extend a number of expired or expiring provisions. Typically, their 
extension would be included as part of a larger spending package or 
budget deal at the end of the year. Unfortunately, this never occurred 
at the end of last year. Now, here we are almost 7 months into the end 
of 2018 and 3 months after the close of the regular tax filing season, 
and taxpayers still have no answers.
  The budget and debt limit agreement announced Monday is yet another 
missed opportunity to provide answers for millions of taxpayers--both 
individuals and businesses--who are waiting on Congress so they can 
finalize their 2018 taxes and, in some cases, it may even mean whether 
or not they can stay in business.
  While Finance Committee Ranking Member Wyden and I, working as a 
team, have been ready and willing to address tax extenders since early 
on in this Congress, the new Democratic majority in the House of 
Representatives has been reluctant to act. It seems as though the House 
Democrats are unaware of the historic bipartisan, bicameral nature of 
tax extenders or how those provisions even apply to taxpayers, 
to industries, and maybe helping the entire economy. This is evidenced 
from the characterization of these provisions by some of these Members 
as ``just tax breaks for corporations and businesses.'' So I want to 
tell you how these are not just tax breaks for corporations and 
businesses.

  In fact, the overwhelming majority of the tax extenders either 
benefit individuals and families directly or they benefit our 
communities by giving a boost to local businesses that many people 
directly rely on for jobs and to support their local economies.
  For illustration purposes, I have broken the tax provisions that 
expired in 2017 into four categories: tax relief for individuals, green 
energy incentives, employment and economic incentives for distressed 
areas, and general business incentives.
  If you look at this chart, you will see that these four categories 
are broken down by the relative costs of the extension of the tax 
extender in each category. As you can see, based upon Joint Committee 
on Taxation estimates--these aren't my estimates, but Joint Committee 
on Taxation estimates--of a 2-year extension of these provisions for 
2018 and 2019, the largest cost associated with extending them is for 
what is termed ``green energy incentives.''
  These green energy incentives account for nearly 60 percent of the 
cost of this extension. These incentives include provisions to 
encourage the use and production of clean and renewable fuels, to 
promote electricity generation from certain clean and renewable 
sources, and tax incentives for more energy efficient buildings and 
homes.
  Here I would have thought the new Democratic majority in the House 
would be all about what we call green jobs, and reducing our Nation's 
carbon emissions through alternative energy sources is what we are 
talking about here. Yet the new Democratic majority has been reluctant 
to embrace a bipartisan tax package with nearly 60 percent of the cost 
dedicated to green energy incentives.
  The long delay in addressing these provisions is needlessly putting 
thousands of good-paying green jobs at stake. A couple weeks ago, we 
saw a biodiesel plant in Nebraska close down, costing about 40 
employees their jobs. Just this very day, a renewable energy group 
announced it is closing a Texas plant due to the uncertainty of the 
biodiesel tax credit. Should we fail to extend the biodiesel tax credit 
soon, many more will be closed. That would put the 60,000 jobs 
supported by the biodiesel industry nationwide in jeopardy.
  Going to another one, after this green energy proposal which I just 
discussed, individual provisions represent the second largest component 
of tax extenders, totaling nearly one-third of the cost. These 
provisions include relief for homeowners who obtained debt forgiveness 
on home mortgages, a deduction for mortgage insurance premiums, and a 
provision that allows college students to deduct tuition and related 
expenses. In regard to college students, wouldn't you think the new 
Democratic majority would be interested in helping college students?
  They also include incentives for individual consumers to purchase 
energy-efficient products for their homes, as well as certain types of 
alternative vehicles.
  To highlight just one of these provisions, in 2017, over 1.5 million 
taxpayers took advantage of the college tuition deduction. You can 
think of that as over 1.5 million students who have been left dangling 
for last year and this year as Congress continues to consider whether 
or not to extend this college tuition deduction. For some, this 
deduction of up to $4,000 for education expenses can make the 
difference between continuing their education or waiting another year 
to finish a degree and to move up to a better job.
  The remaining two categories are small in terms of cost in comparison 
to the first two. The provisions relating to employment and economic 
initiatives for distressed areas makes up only 4.1 percent of the 
overall cost and consists of two provisions. One would be the Indian 
employment credit, and the other would be the empowerment zone 
incentives.
  Now, this is really odd. It is really hard to believe the new House 
Democratic majority finds it very objectionable to incentivize 
employers to hire Native Americans or, for the second part of it, to 
provide incentives to encourage businesses to locate and bring jobs to 
low-income areas. I hear the new majority in the other body talking 
that we don't do enough to help low-income people. What is better than 
providing them with jobs and doing it through the empowerment zone 
incentives tax credit so you get capital in there to build jobs up in 
low-income areas?
  If we can't address these two employment and economic incentives, how 
are we going to deal with two much larger ones that expire at the end 
of this year--the work opportunity tax credit and the new markets tax 
credit--all to create jobs?
  I guess it must somehow be the final category, which I have termed 
general business incentives, that the House Democratic majority must 
find objectionable because it falls into the category that we are only 
trying to help

[[Page S5038]]

big business or big corporations. That is their accusation.
  These provisions make a whopping 4.5 percent of the total cost of 
extending provisions that expired at the end of 2017. Most of these 
provisions have very minimal cost as they only accelerate when a 
business may deduct certain deductions and not whether the costs are 
deductible in the first place.
  However, the most costly of what I term general business incentives 
is also likely the most popular. I am going to show you in just a 
minute. It is the most popular because it has such an overwhelming 
number of cosponsors in both bodies. That is the short line tax credit. 
This provision offers a tax credit to short line railroads for 
qualified maintenance expenditures. This credit isn't available to the 
largest railroads, which we call the class 1 railroads. This credit 
benefits smaller railroads that are critically important for farmers 
and many manufacturers to get their products to the global markets. For 
example, in my State of Iowa, according to recent data from the 
American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association, there are nine 
short line and regional railroads.

  This credit isn't just supported by and important to the railroads 
themselves; it is also supported by the users of short line railroads 
who depend on these railroads to get their products to market around 
the world. For example, Midwest soybean farmers selling to the Asian 
market typically must ship their crop by rail to the Port of Seattle, 
and the short line railroads are part of that railroad system and are 
critical to that transportation network.
  The fact is, this provision is far more than some sort of giveaway to 
business. It is a provision that is important to whole communities. 
This is probably a big reason why legislation making this short line 
tax credit permanent currently has 50 cosponsors in this body of the 
Senate and 228 cosponsors in the House of Representatives.
  I hope I have been able to clear up some of the misunderstanding 
regarding tax extenders for the new Democratic majority in the House, 
not only on the substance of these tax extenders but also on the fact 
that extending these tax credits has been both bicameral and bipartisan 
for at least a couple of decades. Extenders are not just about 
businesses or corporations. This overwhelmingly benefits individuals--
individuals. It benefits green energy and promotes job creation in 
urban and rural communities alike.
  In order to provide certainty--and you need certainty in tax law. If 
you want to provide certainty to the people who relied on these 
provisions in 2018 and potentially this year, we should extend them at 
least through 2019 as quickly as possible. This could have been done as 
part of the bipartisan agreement on budget and debt limits announced 
Monday. Unfortunately, I fear a misunderstanding of what extenders 
really are by the new Members in the House of Representatives and whom 
they benefit on the part of the same Democratic House majority 
contributed to these extenders being left out of the deal announced 
Monday.
  I know there are those who question the need to extend these 
provisions in perpetuity. It happens that I agree with those points of 
view. That is why the Finance Committee, which I chair, created a 
series of task forces to examine these policies for the long term.
  The task forces were charged with examining each of these provisions 
to determine if we can reach a consensus on a long-term resolution so 
that we don't have to have an extended debate every 2 years about 
extending extenders or tax credits.
  I look forward to receiving the summations of the task forces that I 
have appointed later this week. Hopefully, these submissions will 
provide a basis for the Finance Committee to put together an extenders 
package before the end of the year that includes longer term solutions 
for as many of these temporary provisions as possible.
  This is important so that we can stop the annual exercise of kicking 
the can down the road. However, in the meantime, I remain committed to 
acting as soon as possible so that taxpayers who have relied on these 
provisions in 2018 don't end up feeling like Charlie Brown after Lucy 
pulls the football away.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming.

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